Beginning OpenOffice Calc: From Setting Up Simple Spreadsheets to Business Forecasting

Making Decisions (IF)

Syntax: IF(Test; True; False)

The most important of all conditional functions used in OpenOffice.org Calc is IF. It takes three arguments:

• Test: the condition you want to test for.
• True: what IF returns when test returns TRUE.
• False: what IF returns when test returns FALSE.

In the case of the tax rates mentioned on the previous page, you need to build a nested formula that uses more than one IF function. Let’s do it one step at a time.

The first condition is for the $5,000 exemption. Put the taxable income into cell A2 and the tax-free allowance into cell B2. The formula will look like the following one and in Figure 13-1. You can put it anywhere, but for the purpose of this exercise it will be cell A5:

=IF(A2 > B2; "Add ...